To think about New Orleans six years later — six years after the day it nearly died — walking four blocks of Mandeville Street just north of Filmore Avenue isn’t a bad place to start. Without the good fortune of unflooded Uptown or Algiers, but spared the full savagery visited on St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, Gentilly drowned under 8 to 12 feet of water loosed by the levees breached by Hurricane Katrina.

Faced with such trauma, Gentilly had neither the economic resources nor the civic organization of Lakeview or Broadmoor. But neither was it constrained by the acute poverty of the Lower 9th Ward or the distant isolation of eastern New Orleans.

In luck and money, it lies between the extremes. It’s a solidly middle-class, relatively young neighborhood. Not as fortunate as some, and better off than some others.

Much hard work is left

The recovery of Mandeville Street seems to typify the 80-20 rule that seems grossly to define metro New Orleans’ recovery six years after Hurricane Katrina: Most of the work is done. But scars remain. What’s left is hard, and only getting harder.

Along Mandeville between Filmore and Prentiss avenues, the streetscape is a mix of construction and renovation that testifies to the tenacity and grit of the families who have built or rebuilt there.

Among its approximately 30 properties, 20 are occupied. One home is under construction. But five lots — one now a lushly cultivated garden — lie bare where houses used to stand. Three houses stand vacant. One building, a duplex, is collapsing on itself.

Here on Mandeville Street, the hammers and saws have mostly gone silent. As elsewhere in the metro area, from Metairie to lower Plaquemines Parish, tens of thousands of families across the region have quietly completed their individual journeys, although sometimes with a degree of permanent loss: new financial burdens, different jobs, different communities.

Resettled, for better or worse

When he looks out over his Southern Baptist congregation on Paris Avenue in Gentilly, the Rev. Chad Gilbert estimates almost all have resettled their lives, for better or worse.

Although bitter memories are easily surfaced, “spiritually and emotionally, I’d say they’ve just about recovered. Actually, Katrina isn’t something I bring up much anymore,” he said.

But most is not all.

According to relief agency officials, thousands of families around metro New Orleans still struggle under a rockslide of misfortune Katrina loosed upon them.

These are the hard cases: people who were sick, elderly, underinsured, or victimized by contractor fraud or the Road Home program’s valuations of their homes.

Recovery agency officials say they are still in touch with families in Houston, Atlanta or Baton Rouge trying to claw their way back home to the 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans, or Gentilly.

“For lots of people, I know there’s a sense that we’ve moved on from this, that it’s in the distant past,” said Kevin Fitzpatrick, director of Operation Helping Hands, the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ Katrina recovery agency. “But that depends on who you know. If you know somebody who’s lost everything, then you know it’s still very much a struggle.”

“Every year I re-evaluate, and ask myself, should we be open?” said Connie Uddo, director of St. Paul’s Homecoming Center, an Episcopal ministry in Gentilly just a mile from Mandeville Street. “And it’s never a ‘no,’ because the need is still there.”

“Everybody said this would be a 10-year recovery, she said. “And you know what? This is only year six.”

Population shifts after the storm

In April 2010, four and a half years into recovery, the Census Bureau found that Katrina cost New Orleans 29 percent of its population; Jefferson, 5 percent; St. Bernard, 47 percent; Plaquemines, 14 percent.

Some of those people settled nearby. St. Tammany’s population grew 22 percent; St. Charles Parish grew 10 percent; St. John the Baptist grew 7 percent.

But census takers counted a net loss of nearly 150,000 people who were driven out of a metropolitan area of what was once 1.3 million.

Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a co-author with Elaine Ortiz of “The New Orleans Index at Six,” an annual recovery analysis, said the region has showed unusual resilience in facing not only Katrina, but the 2008 recession and last year’s BP oil spill.

Next few years key in recovery

Yet in the sixth year post-Katrina, the analysis can manage to be “only cautiously optimistic” about the continuation of the recovery. It warns that the region faces a crucial juncture in the next three to five years, as the metropolitan area moves off the massive infusion of an estimated $33 billion in recovery money to stand on its own once again, unassisted.

To date, according to the report, the influx of billions in federal assistance of all kinds, much of it still unspent, has nourished the regional economy during its grueling struggle, even as the rest of the nation sank deeply into recession.

One measure of that support: While median household income in metro New Orleans in 2009 was basically unchanged over a decade, elsewhere around the country household incomes fell 7 percent in the same period — and that measures only the onset of the 2008 recession.

And while New Orleans lost more than a quarter of its population, its sales-tax collections for the first six months of 2011 nearly match those in the same pre-Katrina months of 2005.

Plyer’s point: If metro New Orleans has been immersed in its own local struggle, it has missed another.

“Here in the metro area we don’t have a good sense of what this recession means to the rest of the country,” she said. “It’s really harsh (there), and it’s really not here.”

Changes in political landscape

Moreover, the sixth-anniversary report noted, in some key areas physical recovery has been accompanied by other kinds of advantages, including a reawakening of civic leadership, some measure of political reform, and a massive rethinking and reinvestment in health care, public education and public housing.

In terms of health care, construction will start later this year on a $995 million replacement Veterans Administration Medical Center, followed by a new, $1.2 billion University Medical Center next door — which may be too big and in the wrong place, critics have contended.

Across the city, a $2 billion investment in the construction or renovation of 80 public schools has begun. And inside the classrooms, the area’s massive post-Katrina experiment with the charter school public education model continues to play out, to mostly positive effect. The data center’s report found that 68 percent of New Orleans students attend academically satisfactory schools in 2010, up from 28 percent two years before the storm.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have also been spent to remake four of the city’s largest public housing developments into mixed-income complexes, and social services that previously didn’t exist for residents has become a new priority.

Yet for its hard-won progress, the region in some ways is a harder place to live, especially for the poor.

Around the region, African-American households earn 50 percent less than white households; Hispanic households earn 30 percent less, according to the analysis. That gap is slightly wider than before the storm.

Pre-Katrina, Plyer and others have noted, New Orleans was a poor city with a high proportion of renters living in low-cost, often substandard housing.

Since the storm, much of that rental stock has either disappeared or has been upgraded. The resulting jump in rents has bitten deeper than ever into the budgets of low-income families. Before the storm, about four in 10 renters were paying more than 35 percent of their pre-tax income for rent and utilities. Now, it’s 55 percent, Plyer said.

Counterintuitively, homeowners are feeling another kind of misery, as the value of their houses goes in the opposite direction: down.

Around the region, all parishes except Orleans have entered their fourth year of declining prices, and any appreciation of home values after Katrina has been erased, according to data from the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors.

For the region, the next few years will be crucial as the last of federal rebuilding money drains away and the metro economy finds its new normal.

Historically, Plyer said, that has been relatively weak and not well diversified. The “legacy” drivers of the New Orleans economy, oil and gas, the port, and tourism, have shed jobs in the past two decades.

The data center’s recommendation is to take the region’s four job strengths — oil and gas, shipping, higher education and heavy construction and engineering — and seek ways to plug them into the global appetite for renewable energy technology.

One local example of that already: the arrival of Blade Dynamics Ltd., a British builder of huge wind turbine blades, at the Michoud Assembly Facility in eastern New Orleans.

“There are emerging markets globally that are very serious about renewable energy, and that’s a train we ought to catch onto,” Plyer said.

Yet even Plyer, whose data center has documented the successes in the region’s six-year recovery, will not pronounce the region psychologically healed.

“It really depends on who you talk to,” she said. “I certainly do hear people say, ‘I’m done with that; I don’t want to think about it anymore, let’s move on.’ But there are still people pretty deep in the thick of it.”

Uddo, at St. Paul’s Homecoming Center, is similarly impressed by the work left to do.

“I think sometime we’ll hit a point where we’ll say, ‘This is it. It is what it is.’ But we’re not there yet.

“I think we’re four years from that.”

Becky Mowbray and Andrew Vanacore contributed to this report. Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.